


More Than Real: Rhizophora

by TLI



Category: Rhizome
Genre: Clone Sex, Electricity, Electrocution, F/F, Gay, Gay Sex, Lesbian Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 22:04:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20238730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TLI/pseuds/TLI
Summary: One hundred years after the end of the world life is a bore. At least until you accidentally find pleasure in your work, and yourself, that is.





	More Than Real: Rhizophora

I’m a lot like everyone else. I work, eat, sleep, worship, hope and give up. It’s always been this way.

Ten of us work in my chapter at the horticultist enclave. I’ve been here almost 14 years, from apprentice to acolyte to full bioarchaeologist. I like it. In my bioarchy rites I chose the name Lyndriss after the founder of eukaryotic photosynthesis simulation. Through studying, reconstructing and growing DNA fragments we worship the Rhizophora, growing fragments in nitrogen dirt and in virtual simulations. It’s been more than one hundred years since the Rhizopharchy left us. One day we will return to them.

I always wonder what it was like to live a hundred years ago with the Rhizophora. It’s not so hard to imagine humans and plants living in harmony. But what was it like between humans? Did people live in harmony too, did humans love each other?

I love working with plants. The verdant green and dark soil of our seedlings, and the pulsing golden light of our virtual simulations. Sometimes the simulated holo-clones are so vividly precise I think they are more beautiful than a real seedling. I love both types for what they are. At my age most horticultists specialize in either seedlings or simulation, but I insist on tending both. The real and digital each reinforce my work with the other realm.

The Rhizophora fragments grow so slowly I don’t wait for visual feedback. Patience, then responding to what the plant needs without observing it directly. I don’t wait to see what they look like without enough water or in low light. I follow an invisible sense of what they want; watering daily, rotating soil plots, extending trellis frames, rinsing nutrient matrices. At first I did it because I was following the rules, following instructions I learned in my training. Eventually, now, I feel what to do. Deeper than sight or any tactile sense, deeper than experience, I feel what the plants want and need and desire. And I give it to them. I know what the dark interior of the plant needs.

I live in an invisible framework, guiding my decisions and actions to foster and nurture. Somewhere hidden in between the physical world and my mind this framework guides my hands and thoughts.

The Rhizophora fragments grow slowly, until they are ready to bud and quickly become stronger, more flexible, more fibrous, more beautiful. Not quickly due to any burst of growth, it just feels like they grow more quickly as I become more patient. I stop expecting something big tomorrow.

My body grows too. Each day passes, as many light cycles as leaves in the enclave. Years of loading nutrient matrices and soil transfer packs, restructuring UV projector arrays. With no training I know what my body wants.

I remember sleeping on my side one night, left arm underneath me wrapping around with my palm resting on my shoulder blade. And it didn’t feel the same, there was too much flesh there over my shoulder blade. How did that muscle get there? I never had that before. Is that good or was I better before? I didn’t know how to feel.

I never looked at myself for years, and suddenly at all at once I saw the angle of my shoulders, the shape of the body under my skin, the small shadows on my torso. I don’t recognize myself.

But flesh is meaningless. The body is nothing. The Rhizophora, the enclave and water are all. The hierobotanists says we are inferior to plants, and we were never equal. We kill and take and imbalance. We crave and desire and lust. Only through inorganic technology stolen from the root earth do we bud peacefully without the parasitic spawning of flesh wombs. 

I’ve heard rumors that more than a thousand years ago, before the Rhizopharchy even, I would have spored children from my own body. Now we grow children in the fertility enclave. Budding them ourselves is crazy. It’s just dangerous. How would I know how to cultivate and care for the budding embryo myself? The old world was crazy, randomly budding kids from their own bodies, as though any random person could nurture them better than the fertility enclave. Seedlings need to be grown in safety, where they can be tended to, observed and nurtured in light. Not budded from the darkness of my own flesh.

I love the Rhizophora fragments more than anything. They are beauty, life, strength and renewal. It would be blasphemy to ever say so, but maybe I love our fragments more than the true entity of the Rhizophora that we work so hard to reconstruct. I love the fragment seedlings as they are, their desperate struggle to bring life forth from light and water. I love the fragment simulations, their lonely isolation bringing light and the recursion of growth to their simulation cubes.

My existence is dedicated to them. I dedicate myself to them everyday. And, I don’t have the right words for it, but I want to dedicate to myself too. I don’t know how to say the way I feel. I want to dedicate to my flesh, honor myself like I honor the seedlings. My body’s not meaningless like they tell us. My body has purpose. I put the same work and skill into my own existence as into the plants. We cultivate each other. My flesh is me. I want to give my resources to my flesh, to tend, nurture, respond to it, and give it what it wants. 

I want someone to dedicate to my flesh too, to give their time and resources, nutrients and moisture, to my flesh too. I shouldn't want this but I do.

Last year I finally got an individual residential pod. I liked living and growing alongside everyone else in the enclave lattice, but I wanted my own space and light too without distraction or external factors out of my control. I guess the enclave lattice is like the greenhouse and my pod is like a fragment simulation.

How did I get here in life? My memories are all outward. I remember images of the first Rhizophora fragment I grew, I remember a thousand images watching water bead on the leaf of a seedling, I remember walking into the enclave simulation lab and the cold hum of computation. I can’t remember what I looked like. I can’t remember what I felt like. There’s no image for that.

Each day in the enclave, I start by taking measurements of each specimen. I record size, tensile strength, hydration density, color gradient and soil makeup. I have no records for my own body. And I wouldn’t have the right tools to record myself anyway.

My residential pod is long enough for me to lie down, tall enough for me to stand up, and wide enough for my sink, and the desk I fold down onto it. I haven’t used the sink in weeks, and never fold up my desk anymore. I am too tangled in the repair work I do here. 

Lately I’m stuck on fixing this chlorolyte photon capture. Normally I use it to record a full neural map of a plant’s photoreceptor network. It’s necessary to make holo-clones of the Rhizophora fragments for testing, so I can work with a digital plant clone and no organic plants are harmed finding the best treatments. 

The photon capture is still on from my testing last night. A golden proto-rhizhophoric tendril sways gently, floating between the projection columns. The photon capture network is modular. The detachable projector columns are designed for repositioning to scan a plant of any size. 

It wouldn’t be hard to build out the projection column array to fit my body. But the wavelength reader is configured completely differently, for chlorophyll receptor frequencies, not that dynamic metabolism of flesh. 

I get to work. First things first I remove the Network Bandwidth Module. This is when I start to feel scared. The unit is already flagged for repair and removing the NBM isn’t uncommon during maintenance of the device’s transmission network. So the surveillance net will not alarm at this one going fully offline. But I know it’s wrong, and the tremble in my hand and buzzing silence in my ears knows I’m not doing this for maintenance.

My entire life and beyond, I’ve been taught one thousand times: the body is meaningless. There is no self. The beauty of life is in flora, Rhizophora, and the invisible biogeochemical cycles surrounding us that humans are not part of and only destroy ineluctably. My flesh and existence are wrong. My body is stupid. If humans weren’t here the entire world would be beautiful, not just the proto-Rhizophora fragments. If humans never existed the Rhizopharchy would have stayed.

But I’m not bad. I’m just me. I want to know myself.

This thing won’t fix itself. Calibrate the carbon reader. Update the iron trace sensitivity meter. Map to human nerve synapse architecture. Translate the photoreceptor cartographic algorithm to a neural net registry. Remove power supply governor limits. Split test-train data for normalized segmentation weighting. 

I initialize a scan and replicate protocol, pull off my base layer and shorts, then step naked between the columns.

I don’t feel a thing. I step out, and the room is filled with golden light. Turning, I see myself. A walking digital archive of every nerve, synapse and cell in my being. Golden pulsing light, my same short hair, my same firm shoulders, the subtle curves of my breasts, torso, stomach, waist, thighs. I’ve felt every curve but never seen myself from this angle. 

Beautiful. 

That’s not quite the right word. Looking at my holo-clone, I just feel appreciation for how I look. I feel need. I want myself. Desire. I step toward myself. I have to touch.

My hair is on end, prickles of static dart across my skin as I raise my arm, to brush the back of my hand through the light. My hand jerks back, every muscle in my arm seizing. It’s so sudden, in that instant I have no control, the movement is faster than thought.

The photon projection just electrocuted me. A holo-clone this large needs too much energy to touch safely.

But I already miss that feeling when I reached out and my arm jerked back. That intensity feels right, it matches how badly I want you.

I reach out again, to touch your hand and instantly my arm twitches away. You stand there, swaying, shifting your weight from left to right leg. You smile. I step closer, bodies parallel, I can feel the force between us, silent crackling energy. My heart is pounding in my head, in my fingertips, in my lips, between my legs. 

I reach out again, to touch your waist. The power blasts through me, the world is orange gold behind my clenched eyelids. I barely stay standing.

I’m so wet. Crossing my arms I start with my hands on my own shoulders, palms flat on my chest, sliding down warm skin, pressing as hard as I can, pushing my nipples against the flesh and muscle and bone underneath, pressing my stomach as I tense my stomach and relax and tense again, sliding over the flat lower abs, matted hair, touching the hot sensitive skin around my lips. Barely any pressure in the right place and my pulse is pounding. I slide my fingers and hand in damp folds and up to my clit. I move my fingers as far down as possible then up.

This is nurture, this is sustenance.

I lean forward into the light. I set my teeth carefully together, letting my face and chest meet yours in the same moment.

Every muscle seizes and locks. My hands are still between my legs, and now my chest muscles are seizing so hard it presses my hands even harder against myself. Then I’m bent at the waist, my abs contracting so hard for a split second before the oblivion I’m scared they’ll tear.

Completely given up to you, every muscle is yours. My knees are locked then give out suddenly and I’m on the floor. You kneel with me, running your golden hands through my body, caressing dancing shock and seizure across my body in blinding ecstasy. Bent on the floor with my knees at my chest, you kneel over me, lowering your head between my legs and lowering your open legs to my face.

The world falls into distance, very small and far, and at the same time huge and strange. The room loses shape around me. The photoreceptors lose shape until they are tiny, disappearing in the static of my senses and appear huge and monstrous, arcing golden light smothering me. Wandering shadows pass me, pulling and pushing as sharp pain grips every muscle. I am full of thirst and pain and bliss and the need to grow. 

I lose thought altogether, only my cells, blood, veins, bones and flesh. Pulsing awareness around my eyes, ears, fingers, lips, nose, crotch. 

I want to feel your hands on my chest and stomach and lower and when I flex you press harder. It hurts to not feel your touch and it hurts to feel your touch electric and piercing. But it hurts less to feel that. You run through me, part of me inside, sprinting through my synapses, panting breath ragged. Each neuron exploding, my body network trying to understand you. Electron fire lighting every pathway, locked into one. Muscles seize, harder than I've ever felt. Gasping until my chest is locked, held tightly by you, air locked in the vault of my lungs nothing enters or leaves safe from the passage of time. Each breath each heartbeat causes the seconds to melt by, and from that you hold me. 

Photons, electrons, light, heat, energy and crackling noise. Air vibrates, muscles lock, quivering, seizing. Racing through me, the energy rewrites every neural map, synapse and signal. 

Mind racing. Liquid brain overclocks. 

Deep in convulsion, I smell chlorophyll faintly. Then it's gone and I want to smell it again and return to that feeling and place but can't.

You are more than real.

I woke up on the floor, alone. My body was still glowing with heat, with your energy. Or with mine. 

The photon receptors were totally fried. The next day I reported the unit totaled, and scheduled pickup for material processing. I wrote a 600 word report detailing the results of my intentional power surge capacity studies on the CX-220 era surge capacitor circuits.

The next day at work was an odd one. And the day after that and the day after that. I felt great. Somewhere, some low level dissonance that always buzzed in the back of my brain was gone. I feel peace. With my work, with my body, with my desire. I trust myself. And I have power over myself. I can’t trust the world, I can’t change the horticultist enclave. I am myself.

Seven months later I received a thank you note from an anbaric acolyte I’d never met. She said she found my report after having a similar issue with her enclave’s photon receptor, and engineered a solution to execute the same power load conditions without failure. She invited me to her residential pod for a peer-reviewed replication of the experiment. That’s tomorrow night.

  
  



End file.
